Deconstructing Doomsday

For Glenn: “I’ll get the Pecan Sandies.”

“I thought you were freaking out because the cat escaped,” Anthony said.

“We don’t have a cat,” I said. “Well, she did, but Tobi died last spring.”

“Oh, right. Sorry again, brother. Damn, it’s after midnight.”

“Gonna let it all hang down?”

“What?” he said then got the reference and laughed. “You almost back home?”

“I’m stopping at Taco Bell first. Nowhere else is open and I’m fucking starving. They probably have cameras on this lot, but I’m about to piss myself. If a cop rolls through, I’ll just tell him how my girlfriend died in my arms seven hours ago. Maybe it’ll get me off with a warning.”

It had been an awful day, the worst one of my life, not that the day itself was without precedent. The first October 19th I spent with Sue began early in the morning when her mother, Marge, called her twice in a row. Sue’s older sister, Dee, hadn’t returned any phone calls for several days and now wasn’t answering her doorbell. When we reached her house police cars were parked in front of the chain link fence as it drizzled, Sue promptly learning what she expected. Dee had been found nude face down on the beige linoleum floor in her kitchen. There were numerous empty bottles of booze and a drained container of antifreeze in the garage, the latter what Dee drank to kill herself. Before we left, Sue pled with a cop to re-enter the house.

“Say hi to Gizzy,” she said to me when setting Dee’s timid cat, hiding inside a carrier, on my back seat along with cans of her food. “And these disgusting things are for you. They’re your brand, right?”

“Yeah, I smoke Kools.”

“So did my dead sister. At least they didn’t kill her!”

Sixteen years later, my final October 19th in Sue’s company commenced with our latest ritual: I brought a banana, a cup of water, and a mug of coffee into my bedroom-slash-office across the hall from her bedroom then knocked on her door. “Entrez vous,” she said warmly after clearing her throat while pausing the Today show and scooching off her bed to silently hug me for ten seconds. It was an embrace intended to stimulate our oxytocin levels, one she started with Tobi to feel literal love and generate positivity for the day ahead, a simple yet effective tonic a woman dubbed The Ambassador of Happiness would instinctively utilize from her emotional handbook. That as the hug ended, she “booped” Tobi on her butter tail—what Sue termed the cigar-like nub substituting for a full tail—will endure as mere feline apocrypha, but I can reveal that she booped my nose once or thrice.

In anticipation of attending a stand-up comedy show that night, I was quick to fix a few work snafus in the morning, one brainteaser requiring follow up, but nothing that seemed unfamiliar to my problem-solving repertoire. I also sent Sue an email, an article about Madonna’s upcoming tour, the last missive in our yearslong link swapping thread we called “The Email Chain of Chun,” the title one more abstruse footnote from the Blebbziverse. Around noon, Sue’s friend Glenn visited to aid her in filling out paperwork documenting known issues with her house, the one she’d finally moved out of on Labor Day weekend and was preparing to sell. Glenn had suffered his own October 19th doomsday many years prior, a tragic accident that transformed his life, so Sue purposely invited him over assuming it would be a welcome distraction.

Glenn was the man of the house for Sue, a fellow homeowner whose parsimonious, MacGyver-esque tendencies devised a method to tarp over her leaky roof and engineered countless oddball work-arounds like Saran wrapping windows for added insulation during the wintertime to keep her existing in the one hundred and twenty-three-year-old home her parents had mostly quit renovating when she moved to California in the mid-‘90s. Whenever I fretted about a new quandary that arose—the tub draining then getting re-clogged by black crud a week after I plunged it—Sue, levelheaded like usual, had the ideal solution: “I’ll just ask Glenn!” It wasn’t disrespectful to me, but more a relief that I didn’t have to keep pretending I knew what to do. Glenn even assisted me in moving out of my mother’s house and into the one I’d begun sharing with Sue, refusing anything I offered to thank him except for a gift card for a grocery store where he preferred to buy pepperoni pizzas. He’d been a handbook user since high school.

Sue had worried that their chatter in the living room would irritate me—when Glenn speaks, silence cowers—as she wrote her answers in pencil, not her trademark Sharpie, while I checked in with Anthony, my boss, for advice regarding how to solve the lingering dilemma, its open-endedness putting me on edge. Two or so hours after Glenn’s arrival, Sue was brutalized by a coughing attack similar to the one she’d had a week prior. Water didn’t help, moving around didn’t help, and attempting to take deep breaths failed to do much good either. The one time there wasn’t any clever DIY ingenuity in his arsenal, Glenn departed when Sue’s lungs mercifully relaxed for a bit, the two of them agreeing to finish the paperwork together in the coming days, residual intermittent coughs echoing in the kitchen as Sue sent him off with a customary “Loveyoubyyyye!”  

The sore throat that began bothering Sue in March had metastasized into a water balloon-shaped protrusion on the right side of her neck, a bulge I liked to imagine a fantastical pin prick would mitigate, especially when I requested permission to touch it, maintaining maximum delicacy as if it might explode in my hand while being caressed, an alluring, vicious monster. Contrary to the cheeriness she employed when disguising the misfortune that plagued Sober Sue, her self-anointed nickname placing an almost nerdy sheen over surviving alcoholism along with the cirrhosis and neuropathy that nagged her for a decade afterward, she would tell me she knew right away that the lump on her esophagus was not benign. Yet she waited six weeks to see a doctor, an uncharacteristically belated acknowledgment that forced me to wonder if she had to first make peace with her research confirming she would die at age fifty-three, reckoning with her certitude that she would be reunited with her parents, the two people she missed constantly and couldn’t wait to hug for one million seconds straight upon locating their beaming, healthy faces in heaven. She knew she had to stay alive for our Los Angeles trip planned in mid-August, a vacation we’d obsessed about taking the entire time we’d been a couple, and our moving in together the subsequent weekend, my biggest dream throughout all the years we squeezed in an hourlong chat in her kitchen each week—“Our time runneth over,” she sometimes said to tell me I had to leave—and spent each Saturday “out frolicking,” the phrase she was fond of using to describe our adventures. She had a term for everything.

Returning to her bedroom with a bowl of leftover butternut squash soup and a container of coconut-flavored yogurt, two items she hoped would soothe her throat while seeking refuge with the television, I left my door open in hopes I’d hear strictly dialogue now terrified that The Universe had savagely chosen the haunting day for her demise. An hour later, the cacophony resumed. I watched as she pulled her hand from her mouth and blood swirled in the mucus in her palm, her face strained as if bracing to be hit. Now coughing more violently, the crow’s feet she loathed appeared deeper than ever when fortifying her defeated eyes. Unsure what else to do, I rubbed her back, but no genie surfaced, no clichéd cartoon character who would make it all better as she flounced from wall to wall, her devotion to serenity on the cusp of catastrophe while being attacked by the ghost of her past self-harm. Then my phone rang and I panicked. Disoriented and shaken, I talked to Anthony for a minute as he asked me to check something on my monitor. There I was frozen in a new house where I once again had no fucking clue what to do. As I turned to exit my room, Sue stood at my doorway stomping her feet in place and sputtering out, “I can’t breathe.”

That’s when the cat escaped. I don’t recall exactly what I screamed, but I do know how frantic I was. All common sense emptied from my brain as she barely said, “Call 911.” Life exited her body as she slumped into my arms, salivary foam frothing from her mouth as I awkwardly set her on the carpet and the back of her head thunked down on the hardwood floor. 

“Sir, her airway is clogged so you’re going to need to push down on her sternum as rapidly as possible until the ambulance gets there,” the 911 dispatcher told me. “Have you ever performed CPR?”

“On a dummy in school, I think.”

“Okay, so treat her like that. Just keep pushing. You won’t break anything. What door is unlocked so I can tell them where to enter?”

“FUCK!” I yelled. “None are. I’ll unlock the one by the garage. We just moved in here. It’s not our house.”

I abandoned my lifeless girlfriend to ensure a door didn’t get kicked in, but I guess I figured it would save time when they arrived.

“Does she have a pulse?”

“I don’t think so, but I can hear the sirens. They’re about to get here. Yeah, I think they’re here.”

Moments later, the emergency medics stormed into the hallway with police officers. I outlined what had happened to the intimidating strangers beside me, people I had to trust as the excess adrenaline impelled me to pace around them like a lunatic outsmarting a pedometer. As they suctioned a respirator pump to her face—inserting a breathing tube through an opening in her windpipe was too risky, they said—one cop entered her bedroom. I tailed him.

“What the fuck are you doing in here?!”

“Sir, we need to know what medications she’s taking.” 

“Adderall. And some shit for neuropathy. Get the fuck out of this room! I will find the pill bottles. I don’t want you in here!”

“I’m trying to help her,” he said while poking through her sock drawer.

“I DON’T FUCKING CARE! GET THE FUCK OUT OF HER ROOM!”

He did. Meanwhile, a female medic approached me, kindly providing a comforting voice and bringing me to the mudroom as Sue was now splayed out at the other end of the hall, her tie-dye shirt cut in half with her tanned breasts on display, an invasion I deemed repugnant and cruel despite its necessity. I kept peeking over and around the medic’s head and shoulders, not that I could see a thing, but because I needed some indication that she was alive, a question I repeatedly asked while answering the woman’s unmemorable ones. Persevering through one more go-round listing what medicine she was prescribed, in addition to the multitude of supplements she took, I re-entered the kitchen and saw her chest moving with my own eyes. She hadn’t died. Hope hadn’t vanished.

They wheeled her to the ambulance in the driveway as I spied our new neighbors smoking cigarettes by their garage, the unknown couple now co-starring in the most noteworthy event to happen on the street since we moved in. I stared despondently into the back of the ambulance, once more demanding confirmation she was breathing, until they told me they were taking her to Hartford Hospital and closed the doors. The cat would not come back home.

I took a photo of her bedroom, ironically the place where she felt safest, to immortalize the scene. Sue’s stuffed rabbit, Hildegard, leaned against the pillow by the pink sweatshirt she’d been wearing as the remote controls laid near the chia seed and nutritional yeast containers, a separate pile consisting of her hairbrush, phone, notebook, and laptop completing the assemblage. She'd never worried that I knew her passcode, often requiring it when the phone screen went dark while she applied a fresh layer of lip gloss getting ready for me to take photos of her, and I used it to find her best friend’s number and deliver the news. Nichole, one of only four people Sue had told about her cancer, was conveniently en route to Hartford for one of her daughter’s soccer games, whispering that she’d relay the details to her unsuspecting husband and divert to the emergency room. Desperate to momentarily decompress and shower, I first texted Glenn to call me, a man impossible to reach directly because his cell phone couldn’t receive inbound calls; I bet he’s at least contemplated building his own phone from scratch. A return call was made to Anthony as well—the man oblivious to Sue’s illness when eating dinner with us in Malibu during our vacation—as I unburdened myself of the secret I’d been keeping in her honor, one that protected her privacy along with her unwavering disinterest in pity or uninformed second opinions.

The night at the hospital would be the first of twenty-three more to follow. Nichole and I kept scrutinizing Sue’s eyes while practically grinding our teeth trying to will them open as Nichole reassured me (and herself) multiple times that Sue would be smiling in the morning, the nurses more measured in their analysis. The one time Sue would show a genuine flash of life occurred when I brought her elderly aunt, Kathy, a devout Christian, to see her two weeks later. Kathy started a prayer in the room, and when she invoked the names of Sue’s parents, stating how they were with Jesus patiently waiting for her, Sue winced while her eyelids twitched and a single monumental tear, her valedictory gift of glory, rolled down the right side of her face. Sue prayed multiple times per day, thanked Jesus for all good things that happened to her, and loved her aunt in part because she reminded her of times with her mother, not that the two women were siblings. Kathy would tell me that Christ saved Marge’s marriage to Mario, Marge regularly praying for divine guidance at the Catholic church on the opposite side of the street from where they lived. “Dee dying did her in, though,” Kathy said. “She never recovered. That’s when she stopped going to church.”

Nichole and I made plans to visit the next day, a daily routine that led to one form of recognition nobody covets: being on a head nod basis with intensive care unit nurses. When I got home, I spotted waxy bandage wrappers camouflaged by the carpet along with other plastic debris the less than fastidious medics left in their chaotic wake. An aspirin-sized blood stain dotted the rug by my bedroom door, a Sue-branded spray bottle with WHITE VINEGAR and a smiley face both drawn in pink marker on it doing the trick. I composed an email and ate my burritos in silence, the first meal of my new life acquired from the same place Sue and I patronized regularly at the beginning of our time dating. The house didn’t yet feel different without her, nor did I know then that Glenn would begin stopping by every third Friday for Pizza Night, a night when we took turns grabbing a large pie from the grocery store, smoked weed, and caught up while blissfully unaware of how much time had elapsed since being with one another always brought us closer to her. There was hope that night, or so I kept telling myself, although I already missed no longer having her by my side to lie to me about how my cynical second guessing was wrong.

Curiously, it was the absurd idea that a cat had escaped that lightened my mood. Nobody knew about my daily trepidation, how for six months I was convinced my girlfriend would be dead soon, date to be determined. But when I thought about the idea of Sue dying, I thought about the most recent death in our shared life: the cancer that killed her cat. Sue had a memorial service for Tobi—photographing her surrounded by all the stuffed animals who resided on the bedroom mattress—and slept with her freshly brushed dead body the night before we buried her on a sunny Saturday afternoon in April in the same strip of grass where all her parents’ previous cats had been buried alongside the fence across from where the tomatoes grew each summer. Sue had gotten into bed with her dead mother at the hospital and into the hospital bed in the living room at home when her father died, the last times she could feel their skin to remember how real they were, so it came as no surprise that she’d continued the tradition with Tobi, snipping off patches of her fur to store in a sandwich bag along with four of her whiskers. She asked me to take a picture of her holding Tobi to commemorate the farewell, her body’s stiffening shell wrapped in a white towel with her front paws clung together like magnets.

The image of my dead girlfriend holding her beloved dead cat in the yard where her dead parents raised her and her dead sister is, as inexplicable as it might be, what calms me when accepting the reality that is doomsday. Sue smiling in the literal face of death helps me summon my own imperative, if fleeting, smile when thinking about how much I miss her. One of the most useful things I did at that decaying old house was dig Tobi’s grave.  

Sue’s bedroom at the new house hasn’t changed. The bedsheets are still unwashed, and her shirts are hanging in the closet. It’s that time of year when all the windows are closed and I get back from dinner or a concert and can smell her scent, a mix of coconut, citrus, and Egyptian musk emanating from her indelible corner. I’d leave the television on, but it would be cheap. Why tease her spirit when she can’t watch? Her treasured flamingo wind chime remains hooked to the blinds, however, its periodic clanking a sound she claimed was her mother saying hello. And the plant from her old front porch, the last living vestige of her, persists in the mudroom just like she said it would: with a little light and a little water. Our landlord even modified his no pets policy by giving me the approval to get a female housecat, but upon reflecting on the idea, I ultimately declined. I knew I wouldn’t be able to smile when the time came to bury her here.